It’s been way too long since my last post. Good news is I haven’t stopped making pancakes every weekend. I’ll post them all soon. In the meantime, Happy Thanksgiving! Gobble Gobble. The eyes looked really weird to me in that first pancake… so I gave it another go.

We’re huge Bolts fans in the Phelps household. It took me about two months to get Atley to stop yelling “MOON!” when she saw the Chargers logo. Now she yells, “BOLT!” like a good little girl. The conversion is complete, and now… so is the pancake.

The NFL logo was tough because there’s just no way to make stars that small. Dots had to suffice.

I know a lot of you guys try to make these pancakes I do and get frustrated when they don’t turn out right. As you can see, the ones I do are far from perfect, but you can certainly tell what they are. Just so you don’t think I nail it on the first try every time… here are all of my efforts from this morning.

The Padres swinging friar logo is great. So I decided to make a pancake out of it. That’s the final pancake you see above. The Swinging Friar has changed a bit over the years, as you can see here. I went with the vintage version, and I actually thought this would be a pretty simple pancake to make. I was wrong. My first effort was a normal sized pancake, and I quickly realized I just couldn’t get the detail needed in the face as you can see below.

I knew I had to make the face bigger to get the detail to make it look good, so I tried again. Problem is… I made it freaking gigantic. So big that if I would have finished the body to scale, it probably would’ve been three feet tall. So, I tried a third time. Made that head bigger than the first and smaller than the second. I had to make it in three parts to avoid burning the bat or the face. Here they are…

When I was finished… I decide to put all three that I had made on the griddle to give you an idea of their size.

Click to enlarge. Like I said… huge friggin’ head on the right… looks like Mark Grant. Anyway, I oftentimes get asked if my daughter eats all these pancakes that I make and the answer is, of course, no. She always has pancakes when I make them… which is every Saturday, and sometimes on Sunday…she just doesn’t eat all of them. Mom and Dad take care of the majority.

Mickey Mantle was retired for ten years by the time I was born… but he was my Dad’s favorite player… therefore, he became my favorite as well. As I’ve grown up, I collected dozens of his baseball cards and know everything about the guy…the good and the bad. So, it seemed fitting to make my first jersey pancake The Mick. My daughter’s reaction to it was great. She grabbed it, held it up and yelled, “SEVVVVVEN!!!!” So cute.

Then she saw that the “7″ was gone, because she’d flipped the flapjack. Hilarity ensued.

Atley’s favorite cartoon is Yo Gabba Gabba. When she’s not asking for Elmo… this is what she wants. Shockingly, I love the show too. Great writers. Great guests. Here are the cast of characters.

Brobee.

Toodee.

Foofa.

Plex.

Muno.

If you’ve never seen the show, here’s what these pancakes are supposed to look like, because let’s be honest…these pancakes… they all kinda suck. But, like I’ve said a million times. Doesn’t matter if the pancakes don’t look that great… your kids will love them and recognize them even if they’re awful. I repeat… I’m not an artist, and most likely, neither are you. Now go make some fun pancakes.

Ooo-da-lally! Robin Hood was my favorite Disney movie as a kid, so I recently introduced it to my daughter and now she’s obsessed with it. Constant echoes of ”Rah-in Hooood, Daddy?” Cutest thing ever. So, when she asked for some Robin Hood pancakes… I was all hopped up to oblige, but quickly realized that the main characters are friggin’ HARD to draw. I know that if I can’t draw them with a crayon… I’ve got zero chance on the skillet. So, I went with Toby the Turtle. She loves that little guy and he wasn’t all that hard.

As you can see, he was a two-parter. I did the head first and the shell second. One of them would’ve burned if I tried to do it all at once. I even made it quasi-3D by cutting a little slit in the turtle shell and sticking his neck in there. I forgot to snap photos of her reaction, but here she is, under the final product, in a post-pancake, milk-induced coma.

Also, I had to try to do Sir Hiss, one of my favorite characters. He’s the snake from Robin Hood, Prince John’s right hand ‘man’. Turned out incredibly mediocre.

As always, she knew exactly who it was and loved it. Remember… your kids don’t care that you suck at art.

I love the Olympics… so I made some rings for Atley this morning. The second I put them on her plate, she took them off… placed them on the table, breaking part of a ring. The photo above is her incredibly distraught over the break. Such concern. Made me laugh. She got over it, and ate away. The rings were harder than you’d think, had to do it a few times for that photo above and it’s still not very good. Keep on tryin’…